All other vendors[3] display this emoji as a real gun. Even if they all decided to follow-suit and change to a water or toy gun (which could happen, if Apple sticks with this), the change would take a considerable amount of time.

By comparison, if you tell people to bring a snack using the 🍪 cookie emoji, and Galaxy users bring you saltine crackers, that’s a shame, but nothing more.

There is also the matter of backward-compatibility, which is a lesser issue in terms of danger, but equally confusing for end users.

A Better Solution

Apple: Don't change the pistol emoji. At least not today.

Hide it.

Unicode does not depreciate emojis, but there is no requirement to show all approved emojis on the keyboard.

The pistol emoji could be removed from the iOS emoji keyboard without causing any cross platform compatibility issues[4].

Win-Win

Hiding the gun emoji is a win-win situation which ticks many boxes for all of those with varied interests:

For Apple: Regular users don't see the pistol on the iOS emoji keyboard any more.

For Backward Compatibility: Old messages with this emoji still show it.

For Cross-Platform Compatibility: If someone sends you a gun emoji, you still see what they intended.

For Gun Fans: If you really want this emoji, you can copy and paste it - the same way you would enter the ♗ Bishop Unicode character, or any other character not shown on the default iOS keyboard.

It's Not Too Late

iOS 10 is still in beta, with the final release over a month away. It's not too late for Apple to change this, and in my opinion, they should.

Update:No changes were made since the time of writing, and the pistol emoji shows as a water pistol in the final release of iOS 10.0. At the time of writing no other vendors have changed this image, though this could change in future.

Also media attention especially in the United States. The combination of "Apple" and "Gun" in the same headline seems to have proven irresistible. Here's me chatting about this same topic with Zain Asher on CNN: ↩︎

In a case of coincidental timing, Microsoft changed their pistol emoji to match all other vendors just this week. The difference here is that Apple's emojis have much greater influence and reach than those on Windows. ↩︎

Apple has a history of doing just this. iOS 8.3 supported 176 emoji flags that were hidden from the emoji keyboard. These were added to the emoji keyboard in iOS 9.0. There was also the [🖖 Vulcan Salute](🖖 Raised Hand With Part Between Middle and Ring Fingers) that was hidden away in iOS 8.3: supported, but not available for input on the built in emoji keyboard. ↩︎